adapted from By Don Shelby at Minn Post | Published Tue, Feb 15 2011
State Rep. Mike Beard, Republican, from Shakopee, Minn., is the former president of the local chamber of commerce. He says he cares about humanity. He is a man with deep Christian values, a free-market conservative and a veteran of eight years on the Minnesota House Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Policy and Finance Committee.
Sometimes he sounds like a scientist.
Earlier this month Beard lectured his colleagues on global warming. He told the committee members that the planet’s troposphere over the tropics was not warming. He is not afraid of CO2 and he’s not afraid of coal. Beard says he reads several conservative blogs sites. The scientist he pays particular attention to is Dr. Patrick Michaels. Michaels admitted on CNN that 40 percent of his funding comes from fossil fuel producers.
“Our farm was mined for coal three times,” he told me.
“And, now we stand on a point and look over barley and wheat and pines. Did we temporarily disrupt the face of the earth? Yes, but when we were done, we put it all back together again.”
A lot of what Beard knows he learned in church. Beard also says God wouldn’t allow man to do anything to destroy the planet, “It is the height of hubris to think we could.” I asked him about nuclear war. He said: “How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible,” he said, “But, can we recover? Of course we can.”
“God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.”
.Dr. Ben Santer, a climate researcher with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ,was the convening lead author of Chapter 8 of the 1995 “IPCC Working Group Report.” I asked him who says, beside Rep. Beard, that the troposphere isn’t. warming Dr. Santer told me that two scientists at the University of Alabama, Huntsville (Christy and Spencer) reported that in a study several years ago, but when researchers from Livermore, Yale, Princeton and elsewhere found a “sign error” in the math, the authors admitted the mistake, corrected the error and found, by their own calculations, the troposphere above the tropics was, in fact, warming. There is another study floating around, but Santer says that, too, has been found to be bad science. An exasperated Dr. Santer told me, “Unfortunately, the wrong information is still out there.”
That is a problem because that kind of wrong information is often found on the websites Beard most admires. The research upon which he bases his public-policy decisions often comes from scientists working for fossil-fuel subsidized foundations and institutes. People seem to pick the science that fits their politics, whether the science is good or bad.
I told Dr. Santer that Rep. Beard would likely read the reports, because he does read a lot. The question only Mike Beard can answer is whether he has the required open mind.